The War on Language: Part 1

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line, my name is James White, it's a Monday. Our plan for this week is

Monday, Tuesday, Friday, if you're interested in that. I've already announced on Twitter that there are a number of folks

I think it would be appropriate to respond to this week. And given the situation globally, as much as I would rather do things about CBGM, things like that, we are facing a situation where not only will the next few months determine literally generations of issues relating to freedom for the

Christian Church, freedom of religion, freedom of worship, freedom of really global populace because I think a lot of people realize that what is happening here in the

United States will have tremendous impact globally. We need to understand there are many people around the world that are looking to us to stand up and to fight the tyranny that is right on our doorstep, well, not our doorstep, inside our own government because what happens here has tremendous impact elsewhere, not only economically,

I mean, just the fact that our economy has already been massively damaged and will be damaged irreparably beyond that, that has huge impact upon people literally around the globe.

And we don't seem to realize that here in the United States. I will confess that United States citizens are primarily ignorant of the impact they have globally, positively and negatively.

And many of our critics globally don't recognize the positive contribution that the

United States and its economy has worldwide as well. I should think that that's a given as well.

Anyway, much is happening and the problem is there is a very divided voice of the church.

Instead of a clear, clarion defense of freedom and liberty, freedom and liberty of responsible people creating the image of God, a defense of the value of human life, the sanctity of human life, because human life is created and because there is actually only one race and because there is a mechanism of uniting people that immediately transcends and erases the divisive sins of the past.

If you don't believe, if you believe on one hand that your sins can be forgiven in Jesus Christ, but then you keep raising issues from 150 years ago, that's where the dissonance exists.

You don't believe one or the other. That's where the problem is existing. I am seeing and I am thankful that I am seeing more and more people standing up and saying this woke ideology must be rejected and those promoting it must likewise be rejected.

But I remain concerned that a lot of us, we need to be, the other side operates on emotion.

We can't just simply mirror that. There needs to be deep seated conviction based upon an understanding of Christian principles that informs our rejection of the infiltration of neo -Marxist thinking into the evangelical church, which has happened quickly.

It began before we recognized it because those who were getting into positions to be able to promote it wedded their philosophies and teachings with orthodox terminology.

This has been a war on language. This has been a war on honesty, clarity, definition.

You may have sat back a few times recently and wondered how anyone could possibly say that things like mathematics are racist or that seeking clarity of expression is a function of white supremacy.

Those things didn't just pop into existence overnight. They had to have a genesis.

They had to have a starting place and they did. But we are in a war related to language.

Nothing forces us to think more deeply than when we are in a war of language.

Now what are some other kinds of wars of language?

A debate. That's one of the reasons that I can't just sit back and be quiet because in a debate you are listening carefully.

To be a good debater, you have to be able to listen, process, and analyze concurrently.

Social media does not help you do this. Social media may help you multitask, but multitasking and actual thoughtful evaluation of the spoken word are not the same thing.

And so, as believers, all of us, men and women, fathers, mothers, grandparents, church leaders, laymen, wherever we are, we are being forced right now to do some remedial 101 basic thought analysis work because of the way in which the left is approaching this attack upon Western culture, upon values of freedom, liberty, and an equality of mankind based upon God as creator.

Equality in a worldview that has man as a cosmic accident will always result in the destruction of man because it's impossible.

Equity and equality are not the same thing. They are very frequently used as synonyms right now.

They're not the same thing. In the Christian worldview, we recognize that God makes men to differ.

And we have a foundation upon which to be thankful for the gifts that God gives to us and to recognize God is not under any obligation to give us gifts

He's given to others. Once you abandon that foundation and you enter into the secular world and the secular worldview, all the abilities to be thankful for any—there isn't such thing as a gift.

It's just simply genetic happenstance.

There's no purpose. There's certainly no divine decree or anything along those lines. And by the way,

I'm not sure how non -reformed people are processing any of this because they don't have a divine decree either.

I happened to stumble across—I was downloading one of the videos that I'm queuing up for the program, and I happened to stumble across a live indicator for the chief provisionist,

Leighton Flowers, and I clicked on it for a second. I was in for a minute, and it was just the same old, same old, we -have -to -be -autonomous -God -must -be -our -servant -or -it -just -doesn't -work type of situation.

He was saying, you can't talk about what Jonathan Edwards said about strongest desires because that comes from God's decree.

He just hates God's decree. Well, I don't know how any of those folks deal with any of this stuff.

I can't answer for them. I'm speaking from a meaningfully biblically theistic perspective when

I address the things that I'm addressing. But we are in a language war, and the mechanism that is being used by our enemies is to redefine words but to not stay consistent with the utilization of the redefined words.

So they put us at a great disadvantage by telling us that we should be ashamed based upon old definitions of words, but the only reason that they accuse us of anything is based upon the new definitions of words.

So you have the assertion of racism. It is the cover -all term for everything.

It has been redefined from what racism once was and that which is understandable to an image -bearer.

That is an animus and prejudice against another human being based upon what you perceive to be their race or their ethnic origin.

Whatever terminology you want to use, the Christian worldview says there's one race, there's one human blood, we're all descendant of Adam, we're all in Adam, and the only distinctions that Scripture recognizes on that cosmic level are either you're in Adam or you are in Christ.

All who are in Christ were once in Adam, but the reverse of that is not true. Any other distinctions that are recognized have to do with God's dealings with men over time, which are always placed in his prerogative.

That is his right to do with his creation as he wishes. God has the right to place people within certain boundaries.

The entire concept of the benefits that come from a people inhabiting a particular land biblically is understood as flowing from God's purposes.

I think that's why a lot of Christians are struggling to respond to the denial of these sayings because, again, they don't have any meaningful basis for understanding

God having purposes in putting certain people into a rich land and other people into a land that does not provide as much.

The impact of a worldly way of thought is very, very deep in Christian thinking at that point.

It really, really is. Rather than the biblical reality that God placed you where he wanted you to be, and he gave you the parents he wanted you to have, and he gave you the gifts he wanted to give you, and you are called to serve him in light of what he's given to you.

That is no longer even a large minority view of Christians in the

West, let alone our society. And yet, our society flourished when that was a given understanding.

Which it isn't any longer. So, back to the issue of language. I want to look at a clip, and I want to acknowledge the fact that there are some folks out there in the internet and other places that are doing what we used to call yeoman's work.

I'm not sure you can say yeoman anymore. There's so many words you can't use anymore.

That used to mean they're doing hard work. But there's someone that I've started following at Woke Preacher TV.

It's Woke Preacher Clips on Twitter. And I don't have time to be tracking this stuff down.

I'm going to tell you, I don't know how anybody does. But very useful, especially for this week's worth of programming, to have resources like this.

And then you can track down if the whole thing was posted someplace and look at it in broader context.

But it is really hard for any of us to keep up with just the flood of material that is flowing through the internets, as they like to say, both written and in video format.

And so I appreciate this clip from Dr.

Timothy Keller. Again, I have criticized a lot of things that Dr.

Keller has said, and there are people who just really struggle with that because Dr. Keller has said many, many, many good things over the years.

Here's one of the issues we're going to have to be dealing with. And that is we are getting some very serious clarity on the fundamental foundational stability of many people in light of what is happening right now, in light of the cultural pressures and the issues that have been raised by viruses and social justice movement intersectionality and your view of critical theory and everything that comes along with that.

There's been some serious shaking up going on. And what you're going to have to realize is that you may very well, over the past 20, 30 years for some of us, have benefited from person

X's writings. And yet, person

X may end up going off the rails in adopting a set of lenses that fundamentally changed the emphasis of their ministry from what it was 20 or 30 years ago.

Almost all of us, at some point or another, have gone to the optometrist or the optometrist or the ophthalmologist, and you've had an eye exam, and you sat there, probably never realizing how blessed you are.

The fact that you are a part of a very small portion in the history of humanity that's ever had this privilege and opportunity to have corrective lenses provided for you.

Or, you know, I have my reading glasses here that are very dusty and that I bought at a

CVS or Walgreens someplace for five bucks. But you sat in a chair and various lenses are put in front of you.

And as you know, as you're looking through that thing, it's not just one lens. There's a whole series of lenses that are interacting with one another to give the nurse or the doctor or whoever's doing the examination information concerning your eyesight and the best possible combination of features of a lens that would allow you to see with the greatest clarity.

Or, you know, sometimes people have horrible headache issues because of things like that, and just lots of things that can happen.

But it's multiple lenses that are doing that. The same thing is true in this situation, even when it comes to language.

And that is, you may have benefited from people who had not yet begun the process of adopting certain lenses that begin to change their perspective and hence their teaching.

And just as the optometrist can start with a low power lens and then continue to increase that over time to get to where the optometrist wants to get to.

And as you know, they keep saying, one or two, one or two, one or two. And it gets a little frustrating because it finally gets down to the point where you really can't tell much of a difference between one and two.

You lose track. Is there too many numbers there for you? Hey, he's into his seventh decade now, folks.

He's got an excuse for anything. It's pretty cool. I'm actually looking forward to that because once you hit that, then you can say whatever you want.

And then if anyone complains, you just go, I don't remember what I said. So you go from there. Anyway, it's a process.

And it does seem to a lot of us that in the spring of 2018, the optometrist went with the full power switch and everything kicked on.

And the slow process all of a sudden went into hyperdrive.

But the point is that you have to learn to recognize that there could have been people in the past that you've benefited from, and they've changed.

And it wasn't overnight. It was a process over time. And now, as great worldview issues come to the fore, that change is very, very clear.

Now, the temptation for many a layperson is to look like someone, well, that's Dr. Timothy Keller. He's written all these books, and he's so smart.

He couldn't have changed. My experience is there's probably more examples of people changing in their older years than even in their younger years.

And so you have to take the good and the bad. You have to engage in discernment.

And those of us entering into those years, pray to finish well. Anyway, so we have criticized some of the things that Dr.

Keller has said. Here you have a person who claims a reformed

Christian worldview. But he is also very much wedded to not just an urban context of ministry.

New York is a unique urban context. The elites in New York—I don't know if any of you saw,

I went a few rounds with Kurt Eichenwald a couple nights ago,

I think Saturday night. And most of you don't know who Kurt Eichenwald is.

Back in 2014, 2015, somewhere around there, I think 2015, he wrote some just ridiculously absurd articles on the subject of Christmas, just so filled with—I mean, literally, when people started challenging him, he was saying, we don't have any papyri.

They don't last 2 ,000 years. And Jesus identified his Father, Son, and Spirit, the

Council of Constantinople, and just spewing stuff that from any scholarly position whatsoever is just laughable.

But he's with the New York Times. And so when it comes to theology and things like that,

New York Times, you're allowed to say anything. It doesn't have to even come close to having the slightest element of truth in it at all.

And so that's New York. That's New York elitism. And that's where Tim Keller is.

He's in New York City. And I think that ends up having an impact. I honestly think anyone who just lives in the city and interacts only with that extremely isolated, insulated elitism loses contact with not only the rest of the

United States, but the fact that there is an entire world outside of the narrow confines of those big buildings in New York City.

And I think that ends up having a real impact on how you see things and how you interpret things.

And so in this clip, what's been done is the delays, the natural speech delays have been taken out, so it's only like two minutes long.

And so I want to consider what he has to say because it is extremely important regarding the language war and how such incredible inroads have been made into areas that we thought were impervious, but we were wrong.

We thought sola scriptura, we thought the theology would keep this type of stuff out. It didn't. In fact, it's now being used to infiltrate.

So let's take a listen here. My reading of the Bible says that Christians ought to be sold out for racial justice, that all races are equal, all in the image of God.

They should be deeply concerned about the poor and the marginalized. They should be pro -life, and they should believe, at least for Christians, that sex should only be between a man and a woman in marriage.

Okay, now let's just stop right there. So you have four issues that were just raised.

They should be sold out for social justice, and they should be sold out for the support of the poor and the marginalized.

Now, immediately, you have to recognize that those are terms and phrases where some of the major redefinition has taken place in our culture today, and if we don't demand that as Christians, because he's talking about Christians here, so let's stay within the

Christian context, you must define social justice, and you must define poor and marginalized biblically, not as they're being currently defined within the context of New York City.

That is, where is a Christian to turn for a serious, meaningful definition of justice?

Where is a Christian to turn to understand the phrase social justice?

For a Christian, that can only be the application of God's law,

God's revealed will, which is the basis upon which you can identify justice, and it's also the basis upon which

God will bring about cosmic justice, which means you likewise have to have the biblically mandated recognition of the difference between final judgment day cosmic justice and the justice that we as image bearers are told to seek here in this life, and the only way to differentiate between those two categories is to have a high view of God's law, which the majority of evangelicals do not have, do not have.

That's why the majority of evangelicals are really confused right now, because what they're hearing from the woke perspective taps into a weakness in their own theology and worldview.

They don't understand the abiding moral validity of God's law found in Scripture, and since they don't, they have to replace that.

I mean, I don't even know how to estimate the number of people within the church who literally, all they can really say is, we're not under law, we're under grace.

That is the depth of their thinking on the subject of the law of God, and so that's why they're confused when they get to stuff in the

New Testament where the abiding moral validity of God's law is assumed by the apostle when

Paul writes to the Corinthians and the illustrations they use and the citations that they draw, and it's confusing to them because they don't share that same commitment.

They don't share that same understanding of the living nature of all that is

Theanostas, not just the New Testament portion, which is Theanostas, God breathe, the terminology is used there.

So, that is how a lot of people will hear something like what was just stated, and they'll go, well, yeah, sure, but the problem is what is being referred to in New York City as social justice, and who is defined as the poor and marginalized.

Marginalized from what? You see, the neo -Marxist idea is that this is a marginalization of power, not of basic subsistence in life, but of power, and so the same thing comes into the social justice definition.

It's an issue of power dynamics, power dynamics that create an oppressor and an oppressed class, power dynamics that then create intersectionality to where the more you're oppressed, then the more justice would demand you're being given the privilege of others, etc.,

etc. None of this has any way to be mapped meaningfully to God's law in light of the destruction of all of those categories of power and oppression in the cross.

I keep coming back to it. Sorry, broken record, but no one has even tried to refute it, and there's a reason for that, because they can't, but what made

Eric Mason and others so angry a couple years ago about my statement about the

Lord's Table is actually the revelation of what's really the hole, the fundamental black hole, and I mean that black hole scientifically, not color -wise, of, yeah, the very fact

I had to say that's sad, but that hole that sucks everything else into it, that's what a black hole is, is the issue of the

Lord's Supper, because I said there is no place for your ethnicity at the table.

That's a Christ space. Our focus is completely on Him. You leave your history and your skin color and your football team and your politics, you leave it all behind at the table, and you do that because you recognize what the table is saying.

The table is saying your entire hope is found outside of yourself, outside of your family, outside of your history.

It's found in Christ, in Christ alone, and everybody else at that table,

Jew and Gentile, male and female, and yes, slave and free.

Slave and master are all dependent upon the one imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ at that table.

That's the only access you have. That destroys it all. It creates a spiritual equality.

It creates forgiveness. It creates a foundation for unity that Marxism hates and is currently doing everything it can to divide, and that's why people like Eric Mason were calling for an ecumenical council to have my statement identified as heresy, when in fact it is simply the application of the gospel of Jesus Christ, without the lenses of intersectionality and critical race theory and neo -Marxism that then turn and twist the categories of the gospel into something else.

Some are even sitting there going, yes, but if you just had the experience of this group, you would see why what you're saying is untrue, and that's where the problem lies.

That's the fundamental divisiveness that this insidious teaching is bringing into the church.

So, back to Dr. Keller. So, he has raised four issues, but two of the issues require fundamental, clear definition.

I mean, obviously, marriage. He's assuming that there is a universal, clear revelation of scripture on this subject, and he's correct.

There is. There is. Life in the womb. Very clear.

But the other two that he's utilizing, unfortunately, mean different things outside of the

Christian context. Why he doesn't just simply speak of a biblical ethic of recognizing that God calls us to justice.

He doesn't call us to destroy the distinctions between rich and poor. He doesn't call us to undo

God's actual blessing of one person or punishment of another.

That's cosmic. That's in God's control. Why not just simply say what we are called to do in obedience to God's law is to make sure that every person stands before God's law on the same ground, that every person is treated fairly in regards to the objective standards of God's law.

You're not using that law to try to change what God has brought into this world.

So, there's your four issues. So, we continue. Okay. Now, those four things that the early church was marked by them, we know that.

Two of those look very conservative. Two of those look very liberal. And so, right now, what's happening is...

Now, I just want you to notice something. He said the early church was marked by all of these. So, I would say, historically, that means that a critical race theory reading of two of these things is utterly unallowable within this context because the early church wasn't marked by critical theory.

The early church did not have the worldview that gives rise to intersectionality or any of that kind of stuff.

So, if the early church was marked by it, then the modern application simply isn't going to follow.

Since those four things are never combined in any political party, they're not combined in any other institution other than Catholic social teaching and biblical

Christianity. Catholic social teaching. Now, I'd like to just stop for a second and say, well,

I wish that had an unchanging definition, but if anything has fundamentally changed within Rome, it's that in light of the pontificate of Francis.

So, what is Catholic social teaching? If you define that by Francis, that's an anti -capitalist, can't have

God's law in regards to capital punishment. That's not even allowed. That's a sin from his perspective.

Certainly not the historic view of the Roman Catholic Church at all. So much for the consistency of that and fallibility of the

Pope, all the rest of that kind of stuff. But it's a South American liberation theology very influenced by Marxism understanding of these things.

So, that or the historic Roman Catholic perspective of the preceding 100 years.

Well, there's been so much change during that time period. You couldn't even say 100 years, but how do you even define that?

I'm not 100 % certain. What happens is there's enormous pressure, enormous pressure everywhere in the country for churches to major in two of them and get quiet about two of them.

So, in New York, huge pressure for the churches in New York City to talk about racial justice and caring about the poor.

Everybody applauds, but if you say we're pro -life or we think sex should be only between a man and woman in marriage, people are going to pick at you.

I would say in the middle of Alabama, if an evangelical pastor starts to preach about all four of those things, a lot of people are going to get nervous about the racial justice and poverty thing and say, that sounds kind of liberal.

That sounds kind of like, you know, wait a minute, what are you doing here? And so, I don't know anywhere where it seems to me that there's a kind of red evangelicalism and a blue evangelicalism.

And almost everywhere I see, people play up two of those and play down two of those, or even actually stop believing in two of those.

Right. So, you see what happens here? If you do not automatically challenge the cultural definition of all four, because,

I mean, how does culture even address the issues of abortion and homosexuality in marriage?

The culture has no basis for that. The culture is completely capitulated in that point. It has turned the violation of God's law and those issues into a moral good.

But still, the point is, I mean, you can see on a very surface level that if you don't push very hard on what you mean by social justice, what you mean by caring for the poor, what does that mean?

If caring for the poor means supporting the government stealing from people to care for the poor, that's completely different than any type of biblical understanding of quote -unquote caring for the poor.

That's not how the church does that. Believe me, the early church was not going to Caesar and saying,

Caesar, take the money from your senators and care for the poor.

That's not what they were doing. And the same way, you know, as he said, racial justice.

So now I'm hearkening back to only 10 years ago when there was such a wonderful explosion of Reformed Theology amongst all sorts of ethnicities, not just Black Christians, but Asian Christians and Hispanic Christians.

And we were all getting together and doggone it, we could all sing a mighty fortress together.

What changed all that? It wasn't biblical exegesis. I can guarantee you that.

It came in from outside the church. It came in from outside the church. Very much so. That's because there's this enormous, these are packaged deals.

The political parties say you can't have them together. You have to, you know, in other words, to be a

Democrat or be a Republican, for example, be Fox News or MSNBC. You just can't keep those things together.

And yet that is, to me, the biggest challenge for Christian leaders. How do you be, how do you be committed to the whole range?

That's the early church is biblical. Okay. So saying the early church is biblical,

I'm not sure what the context of that was to take us back to the early church, but I would really be interested in knowing, and this is, look, there's truth in what was stated.

There is a tension there and there is a division there. But the problem is that if you would biblically define, and I, believe me,

I hear you guys. You're sitting there saying you can't use that term because if you don't have all these other voices, there is no such thing as a biblical understanding of racial justice or social justice.

You actually can't come up with a meaningful definition of any of these things because you have to have standpoint epistemology.

You have to have, as Vody Baucom put it on this program 10 years ago, ethnic

Gnosticism. Your ethnos gives you special gnosis to be able to understand in a way that no other ethnos can possibly understand.

And really you end up buying into this almost socialist utopia idea that if we could just get everybody together, if we could just get everybody together and listen to all the different voices equally, then you could have a biblical perspective.

But no one group can do this in isolation from the others. And it's all based upon this mythology that within Christianity, skin color determines your spiritual insights into the text of scripture.

That's why I say it's a language war because what's being heard in Bible colleges and seminaries around the land today that people didn't used to hear and are now thinking, oh man, this is where they all missed it before.

This is why they weren't as good as we are today. We have so much more virtue. Then you all had only 20 or 30 years ago.

And there's a real large amount of that. I'm seeing that. I could name you

Southern Baptist colleges where I keep running into students at ostensibly conservative

Southern Baptist colleges that have the biggest amount, just a mountain of arrogance because they are convinced, they've been convinced by their professors that they now have an insight that those of us outside their circles don't have, those of us that may have even introduced them to Reformed theology, we don't have.

They're so much superior to everyone who's come before them. And the superiority comes from their ability to recognize that what we're working toward is this panacea where you put all these puzzle pieces together.

And those puzzle pieces come from the experience of this ethnos and the experience of that ethnos.

And once you put all that together, then you're going to have the great way of understanding. And of course, whatever that great way of understanding is, it won't be what was orthodoxy only 30 or 40 years ago.

I see it all the time. I see it all the time. And so as a result, there's great confusion.

The language war is all around us. And over the course of this week,

I'm going to be looking, for example, at the article that Christina Barland Edmondson wrote that appeared

October 9th, 2020. So that was three days ago. In Christianity Today.

Man, if Christianity Today has not become the flagship of wokeness, I don't know what has. Called The Shocking Necessity of Racist Violence.

Let me just read you one brief paragraph, just give you a sense of some of the stuff we'll be looking at.

White supremacy's sinful dance swaying back and forth between Klansmen's sheets and clergy robes, pains and plagues

Christian of color and lies to white Christians.

Violence is not neutered or challenged. White Christianity's very design exists to maintain false piety and sear the conscience of white people against the oppression and exploitation of blacks.

That's just one paragraph. This is in Christianity Today. This is what, um, if you send your brightest and your youngest off to Bible college or seminary, this is what they're going to be reading.

And it's going to be presented to them as something that they need to take seriously.

Well, that paragraph is filled with so many presuppositional errors that it's hard to even begin to catalog them and it is considered dangerous to catalog them.

Why? Think about it. I am critiquing and will be critiquing and playing the comments of a black woman.

Now, why would that be different than critiquing a black man? Because I will, I'm going to be playing stuff from Jamar Tisby. Why would it be more dangerous?

Intersectionality. We are already in the church thinking intersectionally and we are already being trained.

Many of you, you have secular jobs in large corporations and you have been put through training and you didn't, you honestly didn't even think you were listening.

You were bored out of your mind. And you may have even been going, ah, this is a bunch of secular tripe, but it still gets in there.

And if we do not purposely challenge it, we end up thinking on its foundation and on its basis.

And so the very idea of a white guy, an older white guy, a guy whose last name is white, an old white, white guy, daring to say that the assertions of a black woman are dangerously false.

Oh, that's, that's cancel culture just gets rid of you right then. And eventually all the social media platforms will too.

And maybe that'll be the program that finally gets us banned. I don't know, but there's the issue.

That's the kind of stuff that is that if you're sending your young people off, that's what they're going to be exposed to.

Now, at the same time, I'm saying we also need to know what they're saying. There is insufficient primary source familiarity on all of our parts.

None of us can keep up with all of it. And I, I have very little desire to keep up with so much of this.

I'll be honest with you. So much of this is such a deflection from and diminishment of fundamental gospel truths that it's very troubling and very depressing to the soul and it's destructive to the church.

I'm going to mention just in a moment, I was talking with my fellow elder

Jeff Durbin about this and he was, he was saying, we have had people coming into our church who are refugees from wokeism.

I think you're in the same, you're saying the same thing's happening. Yeah. Your, your, your church is experiencing the same thing.

You can't be neutral about that. You, you can't just sit back and go, ah, well, you know, it's just a strange day we're experiencing.

No, there's a reason. And we are seeing a division that has arisen from this.

Churches that we used to be able to cooperate with, we can't any longer. And so with that,

I want to transition into the other thing that I needed to do today. Last week, and I'm going to try to, try to remember tomorrow to,

I wanted to respond to an article from Jeffrey Riddle. I won't get to it today.

I'll, I'll have to get to it tomorrow. But we had a leadership retreat last week, starting on Wednesday for the elders and deacons at church.

And so first time I've gotten to go because my wife used to work for American Airlines and is one of over 40 ,000 people who've lost their jobs at American Airlines.

And so her schedule just never allowed us to be able to do almost anything like that at all.

And this is the first time we got to do something like that and we enjoyed it. And the, the kids did manage to pass around some kind of infection.

Everybody, everybody, all the kids got it. That's sort of what's happens when you, when you cram probably 40 kids into one particular small area.

Anyway, I'm sorry. That's not just Jeff's kids.

No, no, but there, there are many, many, many, we are, we are taking over the world via, via reproduction.

Anyway, so I was thankfully somewhat disconnected and I needed to be disconnected for a while because the level of nastiness that developed after the

TR Only debate, just an amazing thing to, to consider and to, to observe, be honest with you.

But then the day before we left on Tuesday, the clip from Jeff's presentation in Franklin at the

Fight, Love, Feast, Slap Each Other, whatever it was called, thing, which

I was not invited to at all, never even mentioned, but I won't say anything more about that.

I'm not at all. I am not at all. I think Chocolate Knox was behind it. I think he, he just, he did not, not want to stutter the whole, the whole time.

And so he just said, no, he's not coming. Anyway, the clip where Jeff was talking about the woke church.

In fact, he was asked to talk about way too many things in a, in a relative short, short period of time.

And I'm not really sure if they understand Jeff's struggles with the subject of time.

Everyone at Apologia is fully aware of Jeff's struggles with the issue of time.

In fact, just last night, he had to cut his sermon literally in half. He will just have to complete it next week because Jeff struggles with time.

Anyway, they evidently didn't know that. So they gave him a whole lot to do. And he was talking about epistemology and, and just the whole problem with the pro -life industry, as he likes to call it, which is self -propagating and, and dealing with abortion arguments and all the rest of the stuff.

But as most of you know, the conflict that came out of those clips was the fact that right toward the end of the sermon,

Jeff purposefully having spoken to two of his three other elders, but not me,

I wasn't there. Remember, I wasn't invited. Did I already mentioned that I wasn't invited? I just thought

I'd mention that again. Had talked to others purposefully in his notes, went full

Luther. Okay. So Jeff was shooting to be included in a future edition of Table Talk.

And I'm not talking about Ligonier's Table Talk. There's, there's a lot of difference between Ligonier's Table Talk magazine, which is a wonderful magazine, by the way.

But Luther wouldn't do well with the modern version of Table Talk. But Table Talk is, was the discussions that Luther would have with other theologians, but especially his students around him.

I'm thinking of the room right now. I've been in the room where it took place around these rough wooden benches in rural

Germany. And Luther would utilize examples from life, which means in the early 1520s in rural

Germany included piles of manure and flies.

And he also, well, you can go online. There is a

Lutheran insulter bot. I think on Twitter, where you, it will, if you ask it for an insult, it will pull from a very wide variety of possibilities from Luther's own writings.

Some of which come from his exchanges with Erasmus, by the way. But they're, they're, they're salty, coarse, colorful in, in what they do.

Now, we sat down yesterday, all the elders, and we had a chat about this because the argument in Jeff's sermon was we need to say what the prophets said and do what the prophets did.

And I have over the past 15 years, and especially over the past five years, more than once had to disagree with people who were using a very similar argument.

At least linguistically, it's the same argument. So people who will say that you can approach, for example,

Muslims, in the most egregiously disrespectful and repulsive fashion, because that's what

Elijah would have done. That's what Elijah would have done. That's what Ezekiel would have done. You see?

And so if you can point to something within that context of the prophets, then you can utilize that and still be godly in how you're approaching.

You can say the Spirit of God led you to do these things. I have responded to that in pointing out that 1

Peter chapter 3 tells us that however you do the exegesis, that when we give an answer, when we give a prosopologian, when we give a reasoned defense for the hope that's within us, we are to do so with gentleness and reverence.

Now, that reverence may well be partly because we're handling the scriptures and the gospel and the message of what

God has done in His Son, Jesus Christ. But you can't get around the fact that gentleness and reverence there is primarily in the attitude you're supposed to have to the person with whom you're speaking.

Now, that was a person who asked you for the hope. That's not necessarily the same as a false teacher, a false prophet.

I get that. But the general attitude of the Christian and that whole section—remember,

I have a whole sermon on 1 Peter 3 .15, if you haven't heard it, would be relevant right now.

That whole section is basically saying that if we—it's commanding that Christians, all

Christians, not just ministers, but all Christians treat the

Messiah as Yahweh in our hearts. It's drawn from Isaiah.

I've got a whole sermon. I go back into the Old Testament, give you the background. And the whole thing is that if we purposely, each and every day, recognize who

Jesus really was as God incarnate and then use that as the ordering principle for everything else, it's going to change our lives in such a way that people are going to ask us about the hope that's within us because they're going to see that hope within us.

And the only way they can see that is if we are speaking with gentleness and reverence. If we allow our self -righteousness, our self -defense to come to the fore, they're not going to be asking us.

That's going to get in the way. So that's why it has to be with gentleness and reverence, despite the fact that, wow, it's an amazing and powerful thing to think about the fact

Jesus was Yahweh in human flesh. I am a servant of the God -man. Man, you could go a long ways with that if you wanted to substantiate some kind of authoritarian, in -your -face type behavior.

But Peter says with gentleness and reverence. With gentleness and reverence. And so, it is with that in mind that when the apostle is talking to Christians, in general in the congregation,

I think this is our default mode. Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word is as good for edification according to the need of the moment, so it will give grace to those who hear.

That term unwholesome is sapros. And that can mean weak and not able to do what it's supposed to do, but it can also mean simply bad, as in unclean, as in earthy.

And so the contrast is between a sapros lagos and an agathos lagos that is good for oikadameo, to build up, to build up according to the need of the moment.

And so, what we want to do is we want to build up according to the need of the moment with our speech.

Now, like I said, we had conversation. I expressed the fact that if I had been asked,

I would have said, don't go there. Don't use that language. I fully understand exactly why, you know, again, he explained it in the sermon, but then we had the opportunity to lay it out with less stress as we were talking.

His motivation was very straightforward. We live in a day where political correct speech has numbed the passions in the mind.

And the reality is that scripture does use strong language for infidelity.

Hosea, go marry a prostitute. And yep, in the prophets, when

God talks about Israel's constant spiritual fornication, it uses strong, vivid language, really strong, vivid language of whoredom and equally socially unacceptable terminology.

No question about it. In fact, if you've not read Ezekiel, you really should because you're, well, obviously, if you just haven't read the whole

Bible, you should, but the point being that you're leaving yourself open to being left staying there stuttering if you're trying as a

Christian to give an answer within like a college campus situation. There's some tough stuff in there.

God called Ezekiel to do stuff that I don't think he's calling any of us to do today. That's one of the issues, but it's there.

And what that does mean and what Jeff was saying and what he wanted to communicate is that there are things being inflicted upon the church, brought into the church that are hiding behind how we used to do church.

These people are using our own language. They are assuming the lines of battle of the past, and yet what they're bringing in is such a destructive, divisive ideology that it will enslave those who embrace it.

And so, he was basically saying, if you as a shepherd are going to feed your people woke

BS, then you need to be marked out for what you really are as a false shepherd who's abusing the sheep.

Now, I don't think Luther would be sitting around going, why are you all talking about this? I have no earthly idea why you're even talking about it.

Okay, I get that, but my feed was filled with lots of people who were just simply saying,

I don't care what the context was. You just don't do that.

Okay, Jeff's not trying to say that you should. And by the way, I should tell you,

I've known Jeff for many years now, and I know him much better now over the past couple of years because we talk all the time.

It's the first time I ever heard him use off -color language, and he did it purposefully.

It was in the notes. It had a point and a purpose. And this is what

I said. I said two things. One, the argument is we need to use the serrated edge.

Now, I actually grabbed a knife out of my, I have an entire drawer full of,

I like knives, and looky that. I didn't even try to. What's that?

It's a serrated edge. That's the serration right there. Now, I can tell you something. A, sadly,

I must admit, there's still some tape on the front of this. I know,

I know, but what do you have to use it for all the time? You can't get that box open without it.

It's terrible. What? No, I didn't use it here. Anyway, I'm going to tell you something.

The only person who's ever been hurt by a serrated edge knife that I own is me. Those suckers will get you.

They will grab you. They will cut you. That's just what serrated edges do. And my point is that there is grave danger with the tongue, and we are warned of that in Scripture.

There are many Christians who struggle mightily with sanctification in the area of the tongue.

Jeff isn't one of them. Not my experience, not my presence, but there are a lot of people who do.

When you talk about the serrated edge, be aware. And here's what I said to my fellow elders.

I said, even if I was convinced that this is a freedom that we possess to utilize that kind of language,

I couldn't do it because I'm not mature enough to. I'll just be honest.

I'm not mature enough to. Why? Doug Wilson is attacked more often than I am, but I'm up there in the running with the amount of slander and nastiness and just, you know, just the kind of constant vitriol.

And I'll be honest with you, that puts you in a situation of thinking you're like Ezekiel, and that means it's okay.

If you blast back with what they blast you with, I would not have the maturity to utilize.

I would have to, you know, it's sort of like one of the situations where you may have the freedom to engage in a particular activity, but you realize it'd be better for you if you didn't.

Certain films to see, music to listen to, activities to engage in, whatever.

And you go, you know what? And that would be one. I would have to go, and I think

I need to refrain. Even if I was convinced, I'm not convinced, but even if I was convinced,

I couldn't do it. I'm not mature enough. So we had the conversation.

I'm trying to be consistent. Jeff would know that for all the years he's known me, that has been one of the key terms that I have used and certainly passed on to him the issue of consistency.

I've tried to be consistent over the years on this subject without becoming dogmatic in a tradition.

I am willing to hear the other side, but I just believe there are certain terms that, well, and Jeff agrees with me, there are certain terms that never should be used, period.

This was mild and it was the type of language that doesn't fall into the same category as the four -letter bombs that people talk about and that unfortunately appear on our

Twitter feeds almost every day. But I need to be consistent.

And I'll be honest with you, one of the neat things is, is we could have that kind of a conversation.

I have been, sadly, not recently, not in the past 30 years,

I have been in church situations where something like this could only be handled by a complete explosion and rupture.

There are a lot of churches where that's exactly how it is. The power dynamics are such that this is how you get from the

First Baptist Church to the Seventh Baptist Church, and they're all on the same road. And I am just really, really thankful that that's not the case here at all.

There were no hard feelings. There was willingness on everybody's part to listen and to understand and appreciate and go, that's a really good thought,

I'm going to have to put that into the way I'm thinking about things. It was a blessing to see that elders can meet together and talk about these things and not necessarily agree in the final analysis, but have the freedom to say, let's explain this and let's lay it out.

My understanding is Jeff's going to talk about it later this week, because I told him, here was my concern.

My concern was someone was going to come along and they were going to pull some stuff from a preceding dividing line sometime over the past 15 years or so and try to create a division by playing

Jeff's clip and me saying something and try to create division along those lines. And so this is the first dividing line that we've done since the clip became public.

So I think as quickly as I responsibly could, we've addressed the issue and said, hey, there's two sides to this particular discussion.

I don't want anyone to think that I have a higher view of woke falsehood than Jeff does, because I won't use the same terminology.

And he wouldn't want anybody to think the same thing. The issue is, is there not an argument to be made that there was a bunch of stuff in that sermon that people really needed to hear?

And my concern is there's at least one group that I can think of that will never hear it because of the last 90 seconds of the sermon.

Now, that's partly on them, to be honest with you. But that's part of my concern.

I see you have a microphone up. Yes. I do. I have not followed the...

Controversy? Controversy, I guess, would be the easy way to put this. You saw it, though, I'm sure. Yes. But I have not followed the response to it because I knew what was going to happen.

I knew it because I'm going to remind you about a year ago, you and I sitting right here,

I brought up to you the fact that I periodically in northern Arizona, where I come from, interacted with men who do prison ministry.

This coming back to you? Keep going. And the idea that they will use foul language in interacting with these prisoners.

And this, as I pointed out at the time, was something I can't do. You said I can't do that.

But if somebody wants to go back into the dividing line archives and try to pit you against someone, we've already had this conversation.

And the point is, is that what came out of that,

I was smeared like crazy by the usual suspects. My words twisted into a shape that I don't recognize.

And the entire point that I was trying to raise at the time was completely missed on purpose, on purpose.

And anybody with half a brain in his head can see that when you compare what we actually talked about and what was written about, and somehow

I'm endorsing this is what we do. Okay. But the fact of the matter is, is that in this situation, we need to step back.

We need to be thoughtful, do all the things that you just mentioned and evaluate the point.

If all you can hear in that sermon is those two words, you are -

Are those two words or are they just one phrase? I'm really not sure the technical dictionary. If all that's what you can hear and that makes your mind, your brain explode.

Yeah. Okay. Then I really wonder how effective you can be at sharing the gospel in the first place, because the fact of the matter is, is that it takes thoughtfulness to interact with another human being.

You can't just sit there and slap out one after the other, after the other, these canned sayings.

Too many people do that. But you want to reach somebody for Christ, be thoughtful.

And there are times I can't use language. I won't use language. But there are times when you have to say hard things to that person to get their attention.

Obviously part of, I'm agreeing with you saying, but also part of what I forgot to mention is there's also the issue of context.

I obviously think that behind the pulpit in the church, right before the

Lord's supper is a very different context than a classroom, than a conference, than a street corner.

Or in a room with 10 prisoners in a prison, all of them having very difficult pasts, et cetera.

That's all I was trying to get at, was the context and the environment and that that's how these guys approach it.

And we had a disagreement on that, but there were thoughtful points being made to me that I had a difficult time interacting with.

It is interesting that in Ephesians 4 .29, the phrase is good for edification according to the need of the moment.

In other words, Paul allows for contextualization. It's right there.

And the need of the moment of the pulpit and need of the moment in another context can be two different things. I noticed you hadn't said anything about it, but I was sort of busy, so I just wanted to...

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I hear you.

I had forgotten about that, but yeah, I get you. So anyway, the point is

Jeff's going to do an Apology Radio episode,

I think, tomorrow or the next day. I forget which one it was. I think it said Tuesday, but it all depends on the schedule.

And he's going to address some of these things and probably mention that we've had this talk and that I come down to a different conclusion.

But I think if you've listened to what I said, you see that we're really not all that far apart.

It's a personal decision as to how free I would feel, what you need to hear, and what

I think he would certainly want you to hear. He did not do this off the cuff.

As I said, he not only prayed about it, it was in his notes, he had talked with two of the three other elders, one of whom was there.

So it wasn't just an off -the -cuff, I'm going to try to shock everybody type thing. And I think he's also going to talk about some of the twofold apologetic methodology, answering the fool according to his fall.

I think he'll probably bring up some of that too. But the point was it wasn't just an off -the -cuff type thing, I'm going to try to shock everybody.

The issue was this stuff is exactly as worthy of the opprobrium that we heap upon it as the things that Luther identified in the same way from the papacy.

This stuff is destructive, and the longer we tiptoe around and not lay it out for what it is, the worse things are going to get for all of us.

And we're going to see more and more churches split, more and more ministries. Actually, what I'm seeing, honestly, maybe

I'm wrong about this, but it almost seems to me like you're getting a reshuffling amongst the churches and people who are just getting tired of...

Because here's the problem. Once a church gets infected with woke ideology, you can't have verse by verse exegetical preaching in a woke church.

You can't. Because the whole idea behind woke ideology is this is the most important thing that we are called to do.

All balance is lost. And so people who want that, who used to get that in the church they were at, when it changes, they're going to leave, and they're going to go to places where they're still getting a balance.

And that means those of us that are opposing it can't just do this. It is the need of the moment.

There needs to be teaching on it. There needs to be interaction. That's why we're going to be playing. We're going to be listening to Jamar Tisbee, and we're going to be reading the words of these individuals and hearing what they're saying and analyzing how they are participating in the war on language by redefining it within the church.

So we're going to name names. We're going to lay out what the case is. We can't do anything other than that.

But that's not all we're supposed to be doing. You know, Jeff's overly long sermon last night, which

I mean overly long because we've got to divide it in half halfway through, it was probably too big to start with, is on all the passages identify

Jesus as the Messiah. I mean, that is really basic stuff, but how many Christians can go to the

Old Testament and prove that Jesus is the Messiah? I mean, most people are like, don't even ask me a question about that.

So, you know, I did the Trinity last week. We did the Inspiration of Scripture, and we've been doing all these other things.

So this isn't the only thing we're talking about, but it is the need of the moment. And it could become even more so the need of the moment, depending on what happens in the next number, literally, number of weeks.

So yeah, you can't dodge it either, but you try to remain balanced.

And so, if you haven't gotten the idea, I am so thankful for the open communication and relationship that exists amongst myself and my fellow elders, and the great respect that I have for Jeff and Luke and Zach.

And so, the freedom that I have, we're in a different, this is a, there aren't many situations like what you have right here.

You have two ministries with differing emphases, global outreaches, but there's an interface, me.

And it's not easy to navigate all the things that come up from that.

I'm just very thankful in this situation. It was a wonderful meeting that we walked away from, edified, and hopefully my comments today have been edifying as well for everybody else.

So tomorrow, I will try to, I do want to respond to Jeffrey Riddle, who posted an article on his blog about the shocking things that I said during our debate, which

I think just identifying what they are says a lot about what the debate really revealed.

And then we need to be looking at Jamar Tisby. We've got the Christianity Today article, and I've got some other videos.

I will try to get it all done this week, but I'm not under any particular demands that I have to do so.

You have lots of other things to be listening to, and I appreciate the fact that you listened to this program today, and hopefully you'll listen again tomorrow as we continue to seek to consistently glorify